Semiotic landscapes and mobile narrations of place: performing the local
-
Christopher Stroud
and
Dmitri Jegels
Abstract
In this article, we explore some of the practices and mechanisms behind the multiple constructions of place and its meanings, focusing specifically on the diverse ways in which signage is read and incorporated into personal narratives of place. We employ a methodology of narrated walking that allows insights into how our informants actively construct the significance of local place as they navigate and move through space, and that also illustrates how signage discourses are enacted, performed, disputed and elaborated in local performativities of place. The article concludes by drawing out some implications for research on semiotic landscapes generally, and offers some suggestions on what such an approach to semiotic landscapes might contribute to a politics of local civility by taking into consideration how signage mediates local interpersonal relationships, the situated social dynamics of multivocality and, ultimately, the contesting lives of multiple publics.
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Signs in context: multilingual and multimodal texts in semiotic space
- The presence of minority languages in linguistic landscapes in Amsterdam and Friesland (the Netherlands)
- Informal signs as expressions of multilingualism in Chisinau: how individuals shape the public space of a post-Soviet capital
- 630 kilometres by bicycle: observations of English in urban and rural Finland
- Language contact, agency and power in the linguistic landscape of two regionalcapitals of Ethiopia
- Tallinn: monolingual from above and multilingual from below
- Bilingual winks and bilingual wordplay in Montreal's linguistic landscape
- Mapping cosmopolitanisms in Taipei: toward a theorisation of cosmopolitanism in linguistic landscape research
- Semiotic landscapes and mobile narrations of place: performing the local
- Sexed signs – queering the scenery
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Signs in context: multilingual and multimodal texts in semiotic space
- The presence of minority languages in linguistic landscapes in Amsterdam and Friesland (the Netherlands)
- Informal signs as expressions of multilingualism in Chisinau: how individuals shape the public space of a post-Soviet capital
- 630 kilometres by bicycle: observations of English in urban and rural Finland
- Language contact, agency and power in the linguistic landscape of two regionalcapitals of Ethiopia
- Tallinn: monolingual from above and multilingual from below
- Bilingual winks and bilingual wordplay in Montreal's linguistic landscape
- Mapping cosmopolitanisms in Taipei: toward a theorisation of cosmopolitanism in linguistic landscape research
- Semiotic landscapes and mobile narrations of place: performing the local
- Sexed signs – queering the scenery
